This is Hollywood’s idea of a war movie

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In its long and crowded history,
Hollywood traditionally produced war movies of real quality, some of them even
thoughtful and insightful in their examination of a rich and important subject.
Although the invasion and occupation of Iraq continues, with increasing loss of
life, money, and credibility, Hollywood appears reluctant to tackle the action
in any manner beyond the indirect or perfunctory.

The dull and repetitive Three Kings of a few years ago pretty
much amounts to the total of the film industry's treatment of the first Iraq
invasion; since then, only documentaries, made far from Hollywood, confront the
present engagement in the Middle East.

To show the behavior of soldiers of
all kinds in combat, motion pictures these days tend to transport the action
(and the audience) to other times, places, and conflicts. Gladiator, Troy, and Kingdom of Heaven, for example, suggest
an attempt to make the excitement and the horror of war palatable by distancing
it from our time; fantasy and science fiction films like The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Star Wars saga match the magic of their subjects with the technical
wizardry of the cinema to make war a glamorous, exciting, and even noble
endeavor.

The new movie Stealth provides yet another familiar alternative, inventing a kind
of combat that borders on the fantastic, enhancing it with spectacular effects,
and transforming the violence and bloodshed into a sort of abstraction.
Combining elements from pictures as different as Top Gun, Dr. Strangelove,
and 2001, Stealth shows the usual problems involved in employing a weapon
with a mind of its own.

Navy Captain George Cummings (Sam
Shepard) orders his three ace fighter pilots --- played by Josh Lucas, Jessica
Biel, and Jamie Foxx --- who fly super secret jet planes called Talons, to add
a new member to their group, an unmanned, computer operated aircraft named
Extreme Deep Invader (EDI for short). EDI performs perfectly on their first
mission together, but suffers a lightning strike, which somehow rewires his
brain and drives him nuts. On their next mission the drone turns into a killer,
disobeying orders and destroying a target that includes a number of innocent
people; from that point the human pilots must attempt to destroy EDI, who
possesses superior weaponry, technology, and maybe even intelligence, before he
provokes a global nuclear catastrophe.

The director juices up that familiar
scenario with some truly spectacular flying sequences in planes that look like
some graceful combination of predatory birds and flying sharks. The film shows
scene after scene of the aircraft zooming and whooshing through the
stratosphere at speeds way beyond the supersonic, firing missiles and rockets,
dropping bombs, and shooting up the sky and the landscape.

The film at least hints at the moral
dimensions of warfare when it devotes considerable time to conversations
between Ben Gannon (Lucas) and EDI, as the human pilot attempts to dissuade the
computer from carrying out his dangerous mission. EDI speaks with the sweetly
unctuous baritone of his ancestor HAL from Stanley Kubrick's 2001, and executes some of his
predecessor's malevolent agenda. Gannon's arguments with the machine underline
the necessity of human control over mechanisms, which supplies the theme of
countless movies over the last half-century.

Although the film depends almost
entirely on its numerous spectacular aerial dogfights, explosions, and stunts,
it also includes a batch of primitive plots that take place all over the world
and could supply enough material for a couple of other pictures. It includes an
essentially juvenile love story involving Lucas and Biel; a survival story
about Biel bailing out in North Korea, hunted by a platoon of soldiers; a
megalomaniac attempt by Captain Cummings to usurp control of EDI for somewhat
unclear reasons; and a handful of shootouts on the ground in which one good guy
somehow outguns dozens of heavily armed baddies.

The picture, as it must, moves
swiftly and slickly, full of all sorts of action and a plenitude of visual
entertainment. The dialogue and acting work together to establish a pervasive
sense of adolescent naiveté, which may perfectly suit the vision of the writer
and director, who never allow serious emotion or deep thought to interfere with
the rapid progress of their elementary narrative. At least for now Stealth appears to be the closest thing
to a war movie Hollywood will allow --- full of excitement, with a minimum of
suffering, and perhaps just what the public seems to want.